Hacker News Reader

Comment by _wmd | Hacker News Reader

The most material result of this is that Chromebooks won't have a working SSH client starting sometime next year, because WebAssembly can't do real sockets without an external proxy.

View on HN

No, FTFA: “We will remove support for PNaCl in the first quarter of 2018 everywhere except inside Chrome Apps and Extensions.”

Chrome Apps (and extensions) using PNaCl will continue to work.

Yes, because non-portable NaCl has higher usage inside Chrome Apps and Extensions, but I don't for a minute believe that Google is going to continue investing eng resources in maintaining (non-portable) NaCl now that pNaCl is dead, so I'd expect that to get deprecated sometime in 2019 or 2020.

Disclaimer: My opinion, not that of my employer.

> Yes, because non-portable NaCl has higher usage inside Chrome Apps and Extensions, but I don't for a minute believe that Google is going to continue investing eng resources in maintaining (non-portable) NaCl now that pNaCl is dead, so I'd expect that to get deprecated sometime in 2019 or 2020.

Sure, it is deprecated and will be deactivated eventually (but maybe not soon; consider WebSQL). Google's got every incentive to make sure that WebAssembly (plus the APIs exposed in ChromeOS) provides a complete replacement for PNaCl and apps have had time to transition before doing that.

WebSQL is so sad.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42288596/websql-has-incr...

You've always been able to use real sockets on ChromeOS with plain JavaScript, no NaCl/wasm necessary.

https://developer.chrome.com/apps/sockets_tcp

We're going to make sure that the Secure Shell app for Chrome, in one form or another, continues to be usable on Chrome OS.

(I'm one of the current maintainers and we're already all over this transition)

Thank you for your contribution to a great project that I use daily

That's largely orthogonal to this switch. WebAssembly can't actually do anything except for compute and access whatever its embedder exposes. As others have mentioned JavaScript ChromeOS apps have this API available, so WebAssembly running in that context will be able to access it.

Isn't this solved for (newer) Chromebooks by running an Android SSH client?

https://blog.google/products/chromebooks/the-google-play-sto...

Yes, the native android apps are a good solution - they perform far better.

One caveat however. The meta key is easier to map in the chrome app - for those using emacs for instance. 'External keyboard pro' may helps on android, but the setup is more complex.

Yeah, between this and npapi removal the chromebook has lost a lot of functionality I used :(

Reply on news.ycombinator.com